


New York, by Knight

by Prochytes



Category: Iron Fist (TV), Luke Cage (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-14 05:30:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20595506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: Misty and Colleen's night out from 2x03 escalates, just a little.





	New York, by Knight

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for _ Iron Fist_ to the end of S1, _The Defenders_, and _ Luke Cage_ to 2x03: “Wig Out”; small spoilers for _Jessica Jones_ to the end of S2 and _Doctor Strange_. Violence, swearing, and (implied) under-age drinking.

The bar was called Molloy’s, or Malone’s, or just conceivably O’Malley’s, and it was definitely on this block, or the neighbouring block, or one of the other blocks next to that block, or the first one. Anyway, this bar served the best pint of Guinness you ever did taste outside the Old Country. It was most certainly around here, somewhere.

“I said,” Colleen repeated: “‘it’s around here, somewhere.’”

“I heard you,” said Misty, swaying back to the vertical from leaning against a wall. “I was resting my eyes. You do know that you’re holding a kettle, don’t you?”

Colleen looked down at her right hand. “So I am.”

“Just thought I’d ask. It’s been bugging me for a while.” Misty frowned, as suspicion blossomed. Colleen could be almost as bad as her barefoot billionaire for cultivating teachable moments; Misty remembered that asshole she had decked in the first bar of the night. “Is this a koan?”

“No,” Colleen had turned the utensil upside down; “I’m fairly sure that it’s a kettle. Nice one, too. Copper-bottomed. There’s a town in north-west France where they’re made on spec.”

“That the kind of shit you plan to read about in the _British Library_?”

“I knew it was a mistake to tell you that.” Colleen continued to inspect the kettle. 

“You weren’t carrying it before the last place but one. The karaoke joint, where we had to sit with those Generation Zs?”

Colleen’s brow cleared. “Ah. Yeah. I was at the bar, and a guy asked me to hold his kettle.”

“For real?”

“Uh-huh. I thought it was a line, but he did, genuinely, want me to hold his kettle. Then I got distracted, because _some bitch_ had just bribed all the kids at our table to sing ‘Kung Fu Fighting’…”

Misty counterfeited an innocent expression. 

“… and the guy was gone. I should try to get it back to him.”

“Girl, that is what I privately call your ‘hero face’, and it has no place in a night on the town. Can we table the Quest of the Kettle until tomorrow? Or at least until you’ve found this bar?”

“It’s around here somewhere.”

“So you keep saying.” 

Colleen pointed her Hero Face at the street before them. She started walking, and went on for a while. Misty was five seconds away from suggesting that maybe Molloy’s was out of celestial alignment with the sidewalk before she stopped short in front of a dingy doorway, with a look of mingled contentment and frustration. Misty peered over her shoulder at the card in the window by the door.

“_Mahoney’s, est. 1972_, “ she read. “_Cash only._ You got any greenbacks left, Colleen?”

“Only cards.”

“Shit. That last joint cleaned me out.”

Colleen looked thoughtful for a moment. Her expression brightened. “We’re not done. I know a place nearby we can get some notes.”

“An ATM?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

***

“‘In a manner of speaking’,” Misty said. 

“Told you that the Guinness here was great.”

Misty was undeterred. “Your ‘ATM’ was a goddamned fight club. The Department could have my shield for _knowing_ about shit like that, much less tagging along and holding your kettle like a goddamned cheerleader.”

“Fight clubs are only slightly illegal.”

“As a serving NYPD detective, Colleen, I’m here to tell you that there is no such thing as ‘slightly illegal’.”

“Really? You sure those kids beside us at the karaoke bar were there on real IDs?”

“One hundred per cent.” Misty pushed down hard on the memory that the tall, sulky-looking girl who had unaccountably decided to sing a murder ballad had been wearing a hoodie with “Midvale Tech Academic Decathlon” written on the back. 

“Anyway, I played nice.”

“That was you playing nice? The poor sap who’s gonna have a wire-mesh pattern on his face until Thanksgiving would say different.” Colleen looked contrite. Misty thawed, a little: “But you weren’t lying when you said that this place served good beer.” 

Colleen smiled and raised her glass in toast. Misty watched as she drained it. 

“I’m still surprised at how you can knock that stuff back. I kinda expected a top-flight martial artist to treat her body like a temple.”

Colleen shrugged. “Did you ever know a church that didn’t have to host the odd AA meeting?”

“And I’m in legitimate awe of where you put so many pints. Since you’re basically the size of one.”

“You’re not exactly Wilt Chamberlain yourself, Misty.”

“You don’t have to be tall for what I did on the courts. But it helps to be able to see the hoop without binoculars.”

Colleen snorted, and went back to the bar for two glasses of water. When she returned, Misty’s eyes were pensive; the Guinness still in front of her undiminished. Colleen pushed one of the glasses across the table; waited for a few moments; and then said quietly:

“I’m sorry.”

“Huh?” Misty broke out of her reverie. “For what?”

“For bringing up basketball, just now. You were thinking about it, weren’t you?”

“I was. But you don’t need to apologize. Tonight’s all about working with what I have now, isn’t it? Our first stop on this bar crawl showed me that. And the progress I’ve made… A lot of that’s down to you.” 

Colleen blushed, and averted her gaze. Misty guessed, with a sudden pang, that her sensei’s youth had taught her how to take a hit, but not a compliment. She continued:

“It’s just… I had a life. I had a good life. OK – the coffee tasted like roofing tar, and a solid third of my work-place colleagues were assholes. But we got by.” Misty took a pull at her pint. “Then I got myself boned by an unbreakable man, and everything went to Hell.”

“In Luke’s defence, the chain of events had a few more links than that.”

“I know. But the things I’ve seen since then… You learn the Street, and the Street is bad enough, but then you discover that beneath your town, there’s a hole in the real, and a vanishing city, and the deathless bastards who pined for it.” Misty sighed. “I miss the little world that I grew up in.”

“I guess everyone does,” said Colleen. 

“Luke told me about what he saw down there, when he came to visit me while… while I was healing. A rib-cage you could drive an SUV inside, he said. Did it belong to what he thinks it did?”

“That depends on what he thinks,” Colleen said, “but probably yes.”

“Ribs.”

“Ribs.”

Misty sat up. “I could eat some ribs.”

Colleen rose, and hefted her kettle. “Let’s find some ribs.”

***

“Before we do this,” Misty said to the circle of muggers, “there’s a few things I need to bring to your attention. Firstly, you boys are so comically inept at urban tailing that my friend here…”

“Hi,” said Colleen.

“… has been grousing for three blocks solid that her last set of students…”

“Who sucked at tailing.”

“… who sucked at tailing, could have done a better job.”

“You walk like cows,” said Colleen. “Loud cows. Buffalo, maybe. Buffalo, sweeping loudly across the prairies, or wherever it is that buffalo loudly sweep.”

“And my girl is competent to judge upon such matters, gentlemen,” Misty had raised her voice, “because she knows kung fu. As does her man. He has a glowing hand. That’s from focussing his _chi_, incidentally, not because of, you know, mutual friction.”

“Jesus, Misty…”

“Thirdly – this one is the doozy– you are standing between a serving NYPD officer and her ribs. This is your last chance to walk away.” 

“Morons,” said Colleen, as the circle tightened around them. “Loud buffalo morons. Do you see this kettle? DO YOU SEE THIS KETTLE?”

The muggers’ eyes followed the kettle, as Colleen lobbed it high into the air. She kicked off the solar plexus of one opponent to drive the heel of her hand into the cheek of another; broke the nose of a third with a head-butt; and caught the kettle. 

“And that, gentlemen,” said Misty, bringing the count to four with a sucker punch, “is why they say a watched pot never boils. You done?”

Twinned gleams as the two remaining muggers flicked open knives. Misty winced.

“Oh, you have got to be shitting m…”

Out of the shadows behind the muggers, a long pale hand emerged. The hand took one of the two by the scruff of the neck, and tossed him over the neighbouring wall. It balled into a fist, and punched the sole survivor across to the other sidewalk. Misty peered into the shadows, and frowned.

“We had that, Jones,” she said. 

“Yeah; you did.” Jessica Jones strolled forwards into the light. “But liquor runs always make me philanthropic. Hey, Detective Knight. Hey, She-Ra. Where’s your claymore?”

“It’s not for casual wear,” said Colleen, “and it’s a katana.”

“Maybe it just looks like a claymore when you use it.”

Colleen scowled. “Who declared this ‘Everyone piss on Colleen because she’s short’ night?”

“Why are you holding a kettle?” Jones cocked her head on one side. “Has the sensei been drinking?”

Colleen made what Misty felt, under the circumstances, to be the ill-considered decision to stand on her dignity. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“You have so been drinking. Knight, as well. I’m the soberest bitch in this alley. That’s a first.” Jones watched as the last of the muggers limped out of sight. “You calling this in?”

“Time for that tomorrow,” said Misty. “I’ve seen their faces, and the ways we worked them over. In the words of the great Joe Louis, they can run, but they can’t hide. Thanks for the assist.”

“Whatever.”

“This is your turf, more than ours. You happen to know where a pair of hungry women could find some ribs this late?”

“Jack’s. Couple of blocks straight on. Big red neon sign. Don’t say I sent you.” Jones glared into the middle distance, which was where, in Misty’s experience, she tended to park her moments of vulnerability. “It sucks about your arm. You’re probably sick of hearing that. It’s not like words from me will grow it back.”

“No. But I appreciate the sentiment.” Jones, whose idiom (sullen backchat) and demeanour (rock chick _circa_ 1981) seldom, if ever, varied, was not the easiest read. But Misty thought that she looked even thinner and paler than usual. “You good?”

“Wading through some family shit at the moment. Nothing I can’t handle. Take care of yourself, Detective Knight.” Jones began to walk off down the road. “That goes for the Littlest Ninja, too.”

***

“I could take her, you know.”

“Bitch can lift a _car_, Colleen.”

“That’s as may be; she doesn’t know how to fight. Did you see her punch?”

“The one that knocked a two hundred pound man to a different sidewalk?”

“Yeah, but terrible form.”

“Hmm.” Misty accepted another rib from Colleen. The mechanics of takeout was one of the thousand tiny trials in her new life. “Jones saved us back there, even though we didn’t need it. She saved Danny and Luke at least twice last year, and they most surely did.” Misty, who had been thinking on the past of herself and others so much this evening, was visited by a picture of a pale girl alone in a quiet suburban bedroom before the storm broke, dreaming of Sam Spade and Kurt Cobain. “There’s a good woman buried under all that sass.”

“Yeah. I guess there is.”

“You get aggressive when you’re liquored up.”

“I’m always aggressive. I have a better handle on it sober.”

“I’m not judging.”

“Maybe you should. A sensei without control is no true sensei.” Colleen’s head was bowed. “I tried to be the teacher my students deserved. I’m afraid, now, that I just turned them into what they saw in me. I taught a girl, once, a gifted one. The last time I saw her, all she would say to me was that I looked broken.”

“What was your reply?”

“I kicked her ass.”

“Solid rebuttal.”

“Was it? Claire told me that my first instinct to a problem was to respond with violence. She wasn’t wrong.”

“Did you lay the lovely Ms. Temple out for saying that? No? There you have it.” Misty dropped the bone in a dumpster, and licked her fingers. “Personal growth.”

Colleen fought back a smile. 

“When did your student give you this smack talk, anyway?”

“Bakuto had me prisoner at his compound. He wanted to harvest my internal organs.”

“Your old sensei really was a prince. It’s a shame you only got to kill him twice.” 

“I…” Colleen frowned, and lifted her head. “Do you hear that?”

Misty looked puzzled. “I don’t hear a sound.”

“Exactly.” Colleen carefully laid the box with the remaining ribs against the dumpster. “When did New York suddenly get so quiet?”

Beyond the dumpster, the walls opened out into a parking lot. The lot was deserted, and graced only by one fitful street-lamp. Near the centre, a breeze goaded a discarded flier to a dervish reel.

Colleen stepped forward. As she did so, the surface of the tar-mac around her feet squirmed with golden light. The hairs stood up on the back of Misty’s neck. She had been through enough last year to know the difference between a logo and a _bona fide_, motherfucking sigil when she saw one. 

On that night, when Bakuto cut off her arm (she had avoided touching that phrase, even in her head, as much as she had at first avoided touching the stump; it felt odd, now, that it ran through her mind so cleanly), Misty had been suffering with back-ache, and the beginnings of a cold. Crisis never came when you were fresh and at the summit of your game. Colleen shut her eyes; she looked tired and small, and swayed a little. When she spoke, though, her voice was clear and strong:

“OK. I don’t know who you are, or how you’re doing this. But you had better damn well listen to me.

“Whatever power you bring, whatever name you bear, understand one thing: this realm is defended. I am the first and least of what you will face, if you try to take it. I am Colleen Wing, disciple of the master Bakuto. I took his head; and I have no master now.” She opened her eyes. “I am Colleen Wing, no longer of The Hand.”

The sigil at Colleen’s feet writhed for a moment, and then winked out. As Misty watched, fresh gold cleaved the air in front of her. When that light ebbed in turn, a man stood at the centre of the lot. 

“It’s good to meet you properly, Ms. Wing,” he said. “I’m Stephen Strange. This city owes you and Detective Knight a very great debt. And now, if you don’t mind, I’d like my kettle back.”

***

“‘Doctor Strange’? Seriously?”

Strange rested his tea-cup and saucer on the arm of the bench. “That’s a game you want to play, Misty Knight?”

“‘Mercedes’ is the name my mama gave me.” Misty took another swig of beer. ‘Misty’ is just the one I like.”

On Misty’s other side, a warm weight shifted, as Colleen, draped across the far end of the bench, tried to make a better pillow out of her shoulder. Misty noted, in the abstract way facts present themselves at the end of a long and liquid night, that Colleen had great hair. This was good; there was a lot of it, and it was mostly in Misty’s lap. Misty looked up at the paling sky before she continued:

“So, your… Kamar-Taj are kinda mall-cops for reality?”

“Yes.” Strange sipped again at his tea. “I was on the trail of Pavel Plotnick. A small warlock, but those are always the greatest trouble. They’re the ones most apt to call up what they can’t put down. In this case, Plotnick unleashed the Axial Hounds, and set them on my scent. If they had caught me, they would have ripped my soul to shreds. They’re not easy to evade. I think very fast and very well, but I think in lines. That’s exactly what the Axial Hounds can track.”

“So what did you do?”

“What any sensible person would have done: plug in a strong pseudorandom generator. I put my soul in a kettle, and gave it to a drunken master.”

“Colleen?”

“Indeed. The strength of her _chi_, and her lack of any clear itinerary for the evening, confused the scent. I explained some of the plan to Ms. Wing in the karaoke bar – not all the details, or it wouldn’t have worked – but I gather that she didn’t really take it in. In the long run, of course, that probably helped.”

Misty’s lips thinned. “Did this plan of yours put Colleen and me in danger?”

“No. If the Hounds had found the kettle, they’d have shredded my soul, but they wouldn’t even have been able to touch the pair of you. They can only be invoked for one target at a time. You’d have been in mortal peril later in the evening, when the New York Metropolitan Area fell into the Nightmare Realm because I wasn’t there to plug the portal, but that would also have applied to everyone else in the city.” 

“Sounds like a busy night.”

“I’ve had quieter ones.”

“And the day was saved because Colleen didn’t know where she was going.” Misty sighed. “She’s the most dangerous woman I know, except maybe, _maybe_, the one who can literally hold up the traffic…”

“I could take her,” muttered Colleen, who could apparently hear challenges to her kung fu while fast asleep. Misty waited for a moment, and spoke more quietly:

“… but she’s a little lost, sometimes, and I don’t rightly know how to help her.”

“As I get older,” said Strange, “I grow less and less convinced that ‘found’ is really humanity’s natural state.”

“There may be something in that.” Misty looked down at her beer, which had refilled itself. “I’ve had trouble seeing the way ahead myself. There was a big battle, last year. That was just after I first met Colleen. I lost my arm.”

“The trained eye of a former medical professional told me as much.”

“You used to be an actual doctor?”

“Yes. A surgeon. Before…” Strange lifted his shaking hands.

Misty swallowed. “Do you miss it?”

“Only every day.”

“How did you cope?”

“Denial; self-loathing; a downward spiral of excess; generally being an asshole to all around me; rock-bottom; Tibet; enlightenment; and saving the Earth Dimension from a tyrant universe.”

“Huh. How many of those steps are optional?”

“The ‘being a dick’ one really doesn’t help.”

“But it sounds like quite the life that you lead now.” Misty set down the beer, and wiped her mouth. “Hair-raising, though. That trick with the kettle… What does it take to put that much trust in a woman you barely know?”

“From what you’ve told me, Misty Knight, I think you know the answer to that question better than I do.” Strange snapped his fingers. The tea-cup disappeared. “The night is almost done. The least I can do is offer you two ladies a lift.”

“You don’t have a car.”

Strange waved his hand in a leisurely circle. Light gilded the crepuscular air once more. “I don't need one.”

Misty frowned. “Is this dark magic?”

“Indeed. Partake, and your souls are most assuredly forfeit. It’s this or Uber.”

“Then lead the way. C’mon, slugger,” Misty nudged Colleen; “let’s go home.”

FINIS

**Author's Note:**

> The town in France with the notable copperware that Colleen mentions is Villedieu-les-Poêles.


End file.
